Description

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Two American women, born a generation apart, surf the feminist third wave in these thirteen thematically linked and formally innovative lyric essays. Julie Marie Wade was born the day Denise Duhamel took her first college class. Duhamel published her first poetry book Smile! in 1993, the year Wade entered high school. Duhamel's writing helped to shape the third wave of Wade's emerging feminist experience. Wade came of age reading Duhamel's confessional poetry but was also influenced by what James Atlas of The New York Times named "the age of literary memoir" in 1996. As a consequence, Wade grew comfortable genre-bending and writing hybrid prose. These writers met in 2012 when Wade was hired to teach in the MFA program at Florida International University where Duhamel had been teaching for more than a decade. Duhamel was mesmerized by Wade's work, although her own past collaborations had been in poetry. When Wade asked her new colleague why she didn't write nonfiction, Duhamel said, "I would, if I could write it with you!"

Author Bio

Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade have published collaborative essays and prose poems in journals such as Arts & Letters, Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Nimrod, No Tokens, and So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language & Art. In 2017, they received the Glenna Luschei Prize from Prairie Schooner. Duhamel and Wade teach in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.

Denise Duhamel's most recent book of poetry is Scald (University of Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh Press, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other books include Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel, 2005) and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001.) She has also published volumes of collaborative poetry with Maureen Seaton, Amy Lemmon, and Sandy McIntosh. The guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013, she is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of ten collections of poetry and prose, including Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010; Bywater Books, 2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir; Small Fires: Essays (Sarabande Books, 2011); Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2013), winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series; WHEN I WAS STRAIGHT (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014); CATECHISM: A LOVE STORY (Noctuary Press, 2016), SIX (Red Hen Press, 2016), winner of the AROHO/ To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, and SAME-SEXY MARRIAGE: A NOVELLA IN POEMS (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2018). She has received an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.